I grew-up around professionally-played football in such a manner that allowed me to experience situations that many people would only have to read about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations that happen between coaches and players during the time following an athletic event, when journalists and cameras are gone and the official version of events has been drafted. The fact that I wasn't a gamer for myself, and my journey to the game was through the people who surround the game rather than through the game itself. However, I was close enough, and for long enough, for me to grasp something vital about what high-performance environments can do in the absence of the mythology that surrounds them. The most important thing I absorbed clearly was this: the teams that consistently performed better than their resources and expectations weren't the ones with the highest individual performance on paper. They were the ones who were able to create a culture where everyone determined to succeed for each with the intention of not doing it for cost of the individual reward, but because they believed that the collective had a meaning and an attitude that made personal sacrifice feel important rather than the mere obligation.
This observation is obvious when you make it clear. Teamwork is definitely better when members trust each other as well as feel connected to the same goal. However, the implications for operational use from that fact are less obvious, and they are the areas where many organisations - businesses in the field of technology and football alike - regularly get into trouble. A culture where employees actually want to do their best for each other isn't something you can dictate from the top down or install as a policy or articulate in a slew of company values, and think that it will come to fruition. It has to be earned with time, through consistency in the behaviour of leaders - particularly in the moments that aren't watched and by the careful handling of all the small, nitty-gritty choices that collectively show all members of the organisation the things that are valued or acceptable and what is actually happening when the stated values and the more personal or financially feasible option do not agree. In the top football environments I played in, those small-scale decisions were taken with extraordinary intentionality by the most skilled coaching staff. They reacted accordingly when an older player made an unavoidable error during training. In what way, the disciplinary standard used to deal with the veteran who was twenty years old was in fact the same as the one applied to the young man of 18 who was left out of the team. How the team responded when an individual was confronted with some serious personal issues outside the game. These decisions don't appear in a club's results on any given Saturday. All of them, when accumulated over a season, determine whether a team's performance is at and below the technical limit.
When I co-founded 1Touch and later set up different organizations, one the things I was most keen about was trying recreate - within a technology company setting - the same kind of environment I had observed in the best football environments I had a good relationship with. It's not literal, as a tech startup isn't an organization that plays football and the analogy is quickly ruined if you try to push it too far. At the level of operational principle, the lessons have been incorporated with remarkable precision. The first point was that standards ought to be consistently applied, regardless of rank or necessity. The most comfortable dressing rooms I had been in were ones in which the professional and behavioural standards expected of the newest players in the team had the very same requirements that were expected of the highest-earning and most experienced player. Not because the organisation could not have afforded to make exceptions, but because every person in the room was always watching to see if any exceptions would be made. The answer to that question told them everything they needed know about whether the stated principles of the company were genuinely true or merely cosmetic.
The second part of the lesson was about how organisations deal with failure and the distinction between accountability and punishment. The settings where people developed at the fastest rate were not those where errors were dealt with the most strongly or openly. They were in the areas where errors were most thoroughly analysed and where the discussion on what went wrong was focused and constructive instead of general and distributing blame. The learning was shared by the group instead of held against the person who made the mistake. Accountability means being clear about exactly what went wrong, and why it went wrong and what happens as a result. Punishment is the process of distributing blame in manner that makes people anxious and cautious, and more concerned about their own safety rather being focused on performing. The first one builds organizational capacity. The second creates a culture that allows people to manage their own exposure instead of committing completely to the goals, and this happens in companies in the field of technology with the same outcomes as with football players.
The third point is the ones that I had to take the longest to write down clearly, but that I believe to be the most important: the best environments I observed had environments where the development of the individual was seen at least as crucial as the growth of the player. The best coaches were not only educating players on how to play football. They were teaching them respond under pressure in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate in high-risk situations, and how recover from setbacks, without loss of confidence, and to be the leader that a well-performing team requires its members. It was an investment in the complete development of the individual, instead of just the technical capabilities the organisation immediately required, was not charity. That was the only effective way to improve performance over the long term for the clubs. It will, I believe, be the most effective long-term plan of action for any company that is determined to build something durable rather than just impressive on the surface. Check out James Deller for website info including what operating through uncertainty reinforced operational discipline about teams.
The Reason Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Start - And What Can Be Done To Prevent Them From Happening Again?
Public-private partnership have an image problem that's, generally speaking that they have earned. The history of these agreements includes many projects that were launched with real enthusiasm as well as significant political capital behind them, that drained significant public and commercial resources for extended periods of time and, in the end, delivered results which bore little resemblance to what had been originally promised when the partnership was first announced. The academic literature and the postmortem studies that governments and institutions undertake following the fail-overs are extensive and focus, for the most part on the contractual and structural aspects of what went wrong including the misaligned rewards, the ineffective risk-sharing between private and public parties as well as the governance systems that were designed in the theory but failed in practice, the procurement frameworks that chose to select the wrong items. What this study tends underweight, consistently and consequentially in the long run, is the cultural and operational dimension. It is the reality that public and private companies are two distinct kinds of entities, shaped using different incentive frameworks that operate with different timescales, with different stakeholders, and measuring performance in ways that are not just different in the degree but are also different in character. When you mix these two kinds together in a formal partnership without doing the work beforehand and explicitly, in order to appreciate how to manage these differences, you're not creating an agreement. You're creating the environment for a slow-motion collision, which will become visible at the greatest possible moment.
I've participated in the advisory process for support to institutional modernisation and improvement projects, some of which had public-private partnership arrangements at various levels of complexity. My most common observation that I have gathered from this experience is that partnerships which worked well - which actually fulfilled their stated objectives and maintained a functional partnership between both private and public entities throughout and beyond - were not distinguished from those that failed because of the sophistication of their legal structures, the strength of their risk frameworks or the seniority of the leaders who established them. These partnerships were distinguished by whether those who were on both sides of the table had taken the time to comprehend how the other side operated before the formal partnership arrangement was reached. What it means in real life is knowing the processes the organizations operate under along with the accountability mechanisms that constrain what each party can reach an agreement on and how fast each party can achieve its goals, the definitions for success that each of the parties will be compared to, and the likely points of conflict between those definitions. Any of this knowledge is complicated to construct. Most of it is skipped in favour of the more obvious and quickly recordable process of negotiating contracts and creating governance frameworks.
The usual public-private partnership procedure moves from initial concept to concluded agreement without much time and effort being paid to the question of whether the two companies involved are in fact able to work efficiently over the course of the partnership. Legal teams negotiate the contract. Finance teams model the economics and the risk distribution. The team responsible for communications prepares the announcement in advance of the time of signing. The implementation team begins planning the process. In that same sequence there is a discussion about cultural and operational compatibility - regarding whether the people that will be required to share their day-today tasks across the border between the two organizations have enough common ground so as to ensure working truly collaborative, rather than antagonistic - tends not to take place in a logical way. It is typically assumed without being explicitly stated, it is the agreement that creates the foundation for collaboration and that any operational or cultural divergences will be dealt with whenever they arise. The assumption is often incorrect and the cost of this can escalate with respect to the ambition and the complexity of the partnership.
Practically speaking, the result of this analysis is that the highest-value option a public private partnership could undertake - before the legal frameworks are formulated, before the governance framework is formulated, before any announcement is made to the public - is in what consider operational alignment. By this, I mean particular, structured, facilitated work to surface the places where the two organisations' operational assumptions diverge and to determine how those divergences will be controlled before they turn into operational issues when the partnership is in its implementation. The key differences tend to be the same across different types of partnerships. Authority and speed in decision-making is usually one of the main differences. Public institutions are designed to implement decisions slowly with multiple layers of analysis and approval, for reasons which are completely legitimate and often legally mandated. Private organisations - particularly technology businesses that are built around quick iteration as well as rapid decision-making, often perceive the speed as an important obstruction to their progress. in the absence of a shared understanding of why this is the way it is, and what would really be needed to alter it, the level of frustration caused by this on the public part can deteriorate the relationship before the partnership is able to establish its foundations.
Success metrics, and what counts as progress is another constant as well as a cause for divergence. Public institutions are often evaluated for compliance with procedures, equity of outcomes among various stakeholders, and the avoidance of visible failures that can draw attention from media or politicians. Private entities are primarily evaluated by their efficiency, the amount of progress they have made against goals, and financial returns on investments. These measurement frameworks are used in conjunction with each other however it is an intentional approach rather than just good intentions. The partnerships that do not invest in that type of design usually encounter, at critical moment, with two organizations who are evaluating the same collaboration in genuinely not compatible ways and hence coming to incompatible conclusions about whether it is succeeding. The partnerships I have observed are the ones where the issue was taken as something that would resolve itself over time. The ones that did well were those in which the misalignment was clearly identified from the beginning, and where designing a shared accountability process that met the legitimate measurement needs of both parties needs was an actual work rather than an item on a list things that someone would eventually attain.}
